International Women’s Day 2017

Many women in the western world were participating in “A Day Without a Woman” actions. I suppose I could say I *chose* not to take part, but in truth, I didn’t even think twice. My co-parent has been working away for a week and wasn’t due back until this evening. So the effort it would have taken for my young men to get themselves up, fed, provisioned, and to school on time was more than I was willing to ask of them. For families like mine, if one wants one’s children to be able to continue to function, one needs a male partner to pick up the slack of a day without a woman. I didn’t think that my young men should lose a large part of a day’s education to allow me to express my feminism by removing myself from the workforce.

But that’s only part of it. I also didn’t *want* to step away from my work today. For my paid work, I needed to meet with one of my partners, have a confab with the other by phone, and continue to look for a new teaching space.

My unpaid work is such an intrinsic part of my life that it is much of my identity. For me stepping away from my identity for a day doesn’t fit with my personal feminism. My tagline for my twitter and this website is “Mother, maker” and that sums me up, although in some spaces I have added “teacher” even though it destroys the alliteration.
And I was able to clear a small space in my home studio to enable me to make something. Using one of the crochet hooks that I inherited from my grandmother, I made a simple chain from thread and stone. Physical, metaphorical, and historical connections.

And as it turns out, one of the men in my family did pick up some of the slack resulting from me being in the Centro for a meeting. As I was on the metro and then driving home thru crawling traffic, I was dictating cooking instructions into my phone for Thomas, and arrived home to pork with green chillies and rice for dinner. Win.